As both a sound engineer and a musician, it is hard to quantify just how influential Steve Albini has been to me on a creative, technical and philosophical level when it comes to music. Despite recording some truly iconic albums that became a huge part of pop culture history, he always felt like one of us. He had a fiercely independent and DIY spirit that absolutely never broke or wavered in his many decades of working with bands.
He booked his own tours for his band Shellac, who regularly played small venues and interacted with their audience in humorous ways. He hated perceived music industry bullshit with a fierce passion (he considered his wife Heather Whinna an expert detector of it), and only cared about serving the art of those he worked with. Famously refusing to take royalties on music he recorded and only ever asking for a flat rate – something which applied whether he was working for Nirvana or Raketkanon. He was always accessible to answer questions via e-mail or Twitter, replying to inquiries about his recording techniques in a thorough, matter-of-fact and efficient way. In our small scene, we all know someone who has made a record with him. We are not likely to see someone like him ever again.
With all this in mind, I've picked five of my favourite albums to be engineered by Albini. No mean feat given that he has probably touched more than a thousand records during the course of his life. I've picked my favourite works rather than going right for the best-known ones, and refer to him as an engineer rather than a producer here because that's what he considered himself – a tradesman who specialised in using analogue gear to record a band in a way that captured what they were about.
